atient with summer.

They were nearly caught one day by Father coming home just as they had
got through the gates with Michael's old sack full of road-scrapings,
instead of sand (we have not any sand growing near us, and silver sand
is rather dear), but we did get leaves together and stacked them to
rot into leaf mould.

Leaf mould is splendid stuff, but it takes a long time for the leaves
to get mouldy, and it takes a great many too. Arthur is rather
impatient, and he used to say--"I never saw leaves stick on to
branches in such a way. I mean to get into some of these old trees and
give them a good shaking to remind them what time of year it is. If I
don't we shan't have anything like enough leaves for our compost."

CHAPTER VIII.

Mother was very much surprised by Arthur's letter, but not so much
puzzled as he expected. She knew Parkinson's _Paradisus_ quite well,
and only wrote to me to ask, "What are the boys after with the old
books? Does your Father know?"

But when I told her that he had given us leave to be in the library,
and that we took great care of the books, and how much we enjoyed the
ones about gardening, and all that we were going to do, she was very
kind indeed, and promised to put on a blue dress and lace ruffles and
be Queen of our Earthly Paradise as soon as she came home.

When she did come home she was much better, and so was Chris. He was
delighted to be our Dwarf, but he wanted to have a hump, and he would
have such a big one that it would not keep in its place, and kept
slipping under his arm and into all sorts of queer positions.

Not one of us enjoyed our new game more than Chris did, and he was
always teasing me to tell him the story I had told the others, and to
read out the names of the flowers which "the real Queen" had in her
"real paradise." He made Mother promise to try to get him a bulb of
the real Dwarf Daffodil as his next birthday present, to put in his
own garden.

"And I'll give you some compost," said Arthur. "It'll be ever so much
better than a stupid book with 'stuff' in it."

Chris did seem much stronger. He had colour in his cheeks, and his
head did not look so large. But he seemed to puzzle over things in it
as much as ever, and he was just as odd and quaint.

One warm day I had taken the _Tour round my Garden_ and was sitting
near the bush in the little wood behind our house, when Chris came
after me with a Japanese fan in his hand, and sat down cross-l